Unlike traditional workshops, which focus on a specific topic or curriculum, Spring Writes focuses on you. Whatever your needs, Spring Writes addresses them through each week’s guided experience. Whether it’s a visualization, meditation or other exercise, Mark David devises it on the spot, based on his intuited sense of what best serves each Spring Writes participant. You’ll never feel the same about writing again!

If there was ever a time to stand in our power, if there was ever a time to free onto the page the stories that have chosen us to tell them, now is that time. So feel what you feel, but don’t let those feelings silence you. If you do, more than an election has been lost. If you do, fear has won. 

Write what you know — what you know in your deepest heart. Write your fire. Write your truth. Go ahead and write what you know...if you dare.

“Not only am I not yet finished with The MoonQuest (as I thought I was), its StarQuest sequel will take me eleven confused and frustrating years to complete. Not the book itself. The first draft!”

It is March 28, 2024 – thirty(!) years, more than twenty books, many thousands of miles and countless lifetimes since the moment of The MoonQuest’s conception. It’s hard to remember that Toronto writer who was so stressed by the loss of control The MoonQuest demanded of him. After all, when you have no idea what you’re writing from one word to the next, you have to surrender a hell of a lot of control!

Let these writing tips kindle and empower your creativity all year long, not only during November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). And apply them to all your writing, whatever your form, media, subject or genre.

A year later in rural Nova Scotia, on the anniversary of that Toronto class, I complete the first draft of my first book — a novel I never planned to write, a novel I knew nothing about except as I wrote it word-by-word: The MoonQuest.

"When was the last time you told your story — honestly, vulnerably, courageously? Whether it was last night or last year, it’s time to do it again — for yourself and for all those fortunate enough to share in it."

People are always commenting on my prolific creative output (20 books and five screenplays). But what you might not know is that I was a late bloomer. I didn't start writing my first book, "The MoonQuest," until I was 39, having spent many of the preceding years doing my best to avoid all things creative!

Twenty-seven years ago this month The MoonQuest hit me over the head and demanded I write it. I'd never written a novel before and doubted I could. Boy, was I wrong!

I'm excited by this new, surprising direction, which feels like a sort of coming out – both within myself and out in the world. Suddenly, in addition to all the other kinds of writer I am, I'm something else...something I never expected to call myself!

When I “landed” in Sedona a year ago today, after one of the most financially and emotionally challenging periods in my life, I couldn’t know that I was about to make this place my home. For the third time